David Reinfurt, Author — A *New* Program for Graphic Design

ORG Founder David Reinfurt on how identity intersects design, and what art and design have in common.

For the first episode of 2020, I spoke with David Reinfurt, founder of ORG, half of Dexter Sinister, and author of a new program for graphic design. In the interview, David and I unpack the various ways identity has intersected with his work and collaborations, how art and design are linked, and the origin of the iconic MTA ticket vending machines in New York. Let's get started.

---

Liam Spradlin: David, welcome to Design Notes.

David Reinfurt: Thank you.

Liam: So to start off the same way I always do, I want to know a little bit about the journey that brought you to your current work, and also how that journey has influenced the type of thing that you're doing now.

David: I've worked as an independent graphic designer in New York for 20 years. Before that, I went to graduate school and studied graphic design. Before that, I worked in graphic design, and before that, I didn't study graphic design. So it's a, I think typically circuitous route to the work that I do now. Perhaps the most important thing to know is that during the 20 years of working independently, I've worked with always collaborating with others.

Liam: The first thing that I want to talk about, because this is something that I use all the time and that I've actually studied in the past for projects that I was working on, and that's the MTA vending machines, and they have this very enduring and iconic interface for New Yorkers and anyone who's traveled to New York. So I want to hear a little bit of that story from you.

David: My second professional job was working at IDEO in San Francisco. I started working there in 1995. At the time, I had moved from New York City, where I'd worked in a small graphic design studio. I was interested in interface design, interaction design as it was called at the time at IDEO. And I made contact with the San Francisco office, which at the time was, I think, maximum 13 people. So IDEO was a very different place at that point. I was offered a job, and I moved out to California to become an interaction designer, one of only a few in the studio there. While working at IDEO, after, uh, maybe about a year, a project came in, a last-minute project came in from the MTA in New York.

David: And as I had just moved from New York and was a little bit pining for New York while living in San Francisco, I knew how important this project was. I was the youngest in the office, and my billable time was probably the last costly. Turns out the project was, um, IDEO was called in at the last moment to reconsider the interface design that was already built out by Cubic Westinghouse. That's the company, a defense contractor, and they also built all of the furniture for the subways, based in San Diego. Um, they're very good at building robust machinery, and turnstiles, et cetera.

David: They're less savvy at designing interfaces, certainly at that time. The metro card touchscreen vending machine was set to arrive already in three years from that point, so this was a very last-minute design rescue job. Masamichi Udagawa is a product designer at IDEO who had recently started around the same time that I had. He was set up to open the New York office of IDEO. He had recently worked as a product designer at Apple, designing one of the PowerBooks. Prior to that, he worked at Yamaha, and he was a much more established and, um, mature product designer.

Masamichi and I had struck up a friendship pretty quickly, and we both clamored to work on this project. Made a lot of sense, since he was going to be the New York office, based out of his apartment on 16th Street, right nearby here. And, uh, I was just simply maybe pushy enough or cheap enough to get put on the project, as well. We had a clear communication with the MTA, facilitated by Sandra Bloodworth, who was head of arts for transit, who brought in IDEO to this project. Masamichi handled all of the coordination with the client and with Sandra Bloodworth and the others at the MTA. I was the lead designer on the inter, on the interface. I was the lead interaction designer for it.

The project began with an existing spec and existing interface. We took that apart pretty quickly to understand what could be changed and what could not be changed around that. Kathleen Holman was also an interaction designer at IDEO at the time, worked on Nokia phone interfaces, and she was based in London. So I moved to London for about three months to work on this project. I was based in a small attic in Camden in IDEO in the kind of overflow space of IDEO, so again, it's worthwhile noting that the kind of liminal space of working small and kind of out of the flow of other projects allowed this to proceed relatively smoothly.

From the beginning, I was already interested in how to make this interface something that would persist, that would last. And so the graphic design of it uses coarse graphics. In fact, the type was huge on screen at the time. We would be used to seeing 12 point, 14 point type, on a screen interface to this point. This was absolutely gargantuan. And this was a practical consideration that was developed as we worked through the project, to do with the relative coarseness of the touchscreen that was going to be used and the novelty of a touchscreen interface at that point in time, as well.

The initial design work proceeded through a process which the MTA had set up, which included a number of review milestones and, uh, small user testing groups. It was quick. It was six months. Um, the principal design work both on the hardware, which Masamichi was doing with Cubic Westinghouse, as well as the interface, software design, was a very compressed process, and again, I think the combination of one primary contact at the MTA, an extremely compressed design process, and perhaps a acknowledgment of how contested this screen real estate would be in the future, all ended up in a project which wrapped up in six months and left plenty of room for it to change as it needed to.

At that point, then I decided to go back, do graduate school at the Yale School of Art and study graphic design properly. I could've kept on working at IDEO, but something told me that I needed to give myself a little bit more, uh, nutrition to continue to do graphic design for a long time. So I started back in school in 1997. All of the graphics and hardware spec had been sent off to Cubic. The project went away, essentially, for two years. By February of 1999, the first machine was installed in the 68th Street Hunter College station on the 6 Line. And I went to go see it with Masamichi, and I was stunned, stunned, that the interface was almost exactly as sent. I had already been through enough projects where the manufacturer was divorced from the design and been disappointed with the results, and so I was flabbergasted and excited that it was, it matched what was the design intent.

It changed in the details, and it continues to change, and in fact, the aspect of this project that I feel most pleased with, this has existed for 20 years now, is the ability for it to accept change over the course of its lifetime.

Liam: I'm really interested in this relationship between the work that was happening on the interface design and the hardware design because it's a device where you have to use both in order to have a successful interaction with it, and the interface is built to account for all of the people who would be using it in New York, so I'm interested in, what are some of the specific details that allowed you to accomplish that, especially, as you said, at a time when touchscreen interfaces in public were still a novelty?

David: We took as a given that we would make direct links between all the parts of the machine you needed to touch and what you needed to touch on the screen. We decided to use color to link the parts of the machine directly to the interface, and we went through a couple of rounds of even more direct links between what you see onscreen and what you see offscreen, but for example, when the interface asks you to put in cash, then the instruction bar is green, and that links to the area that's green on the machine.

Masamichi designed those areas of interaction with the machine with exaggerated geometric shapes, which also pulled out the colors. All of this was done in order to make it as direct as it could be, to link what you're doing onscreen with what you're doing offscreen, but particularly because you might be using a credit card, you might be using cash. You have to have a place to have a receipt. The metro card asked you to do a transaction which is unfamiliar, which is you can restore value on a card, and so you have to put in your card, get it loaded up, and then get it back out. And so all of these seemed like significant enough kind of interaction design problems with the machine itself that making the link between what's happening onscreen, the instructions, and what's happening offscreen, had to be as direct as it possibly could be.

Liam: I want to get into your work at ORG, but first, I want to ask who is Dexter Sinister?

David: Dexter Sinister is a shared name that I share with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, who's a graphic designer who know lives in London. Stuart and I have known each other for 20 years and worked together for about 13 years under that name. Dexter Sinister began as a project for an art biennial. The Manifesta 6 biennial on the island of Cyprus. It evolved into a space on the Lower East Side in a basement on Ludlow Street, which was a bookstore we ran once a week. It was a studio, and it was a space for event. The name of that space was Dexter Sinister. The bookstore ran one day a week on, on Saturdays for 5 years. Another 5 years after that, by appointment. It was small. All of this is rather small-scale. Very small-scale.

Dexter Sinister, then after setting up the bookstore, running events in the space, and collaborating on design projects, we started to be invited into art exhibition projects or things which didn't really fall into graphic design clearly. And we welcomed those invitations because the invitation was so strange to what we did. We are both rooted very firmly in graphic design as a kind of discipline or an identity or something like this. However, we've made exhibitions for about those 13 years all around the world in institutions of various sizes, from MoMA to like a small gallery or a basement somewhere. In these exhibition projects, we have tended to treat the invitations as design projects in one way or the other.

So when asked to show a piece of work in an exhibition, we've often turned around that request and said, "Well, we'll do the graphic design for the exhibition as a work in the exhibition." It's still fresh. The piece of that work that I remain very committed to is the way in which it troubled distinctions between, uh, what are the limits of a graphic design practice. How can you intersect it? What does it need to do in the world? Et cetera. That's Dexter Sinister.

Liam: There's a lot in there that I would love to dig into.

David: Okay.

Liam: First of all, I guess, how does graphic design as a practice intersect with art, practically?

David: It's adjacent, I think.

Liam: Hmm.

David: A certain segment of graphic design certainly works closely with the contemporary art as a client, so that's the way I was introduced, I think. So in 2008, Dexter Sinister was invited by the Whitney Museum to participate in the biennial. We were invited, we were given three possibilities for how we might participate. We could design the catalog. That's pretty straightforward. We could design, edit, and produce a kind of separate catalog, which would be a parallel to the existing institutional catalog. Or we could make an autonomous project in the show as an artist.

We decided to take the third option because it seemed the farthest from our comfort level. But the project that we proposed back to them was called True Mirror. For that project, we, Dexter Sinister set up a press office in the exhibition behind a hidden door in a secret room, and we went to work there every day for three weeks, and we collaborated with approximately 30 artists, writers, um, designers, curators, other creative people, to write a press release about the show. The Whitney Museum was kind enough to give us access to all of their email and fax and other press contacts.

We sent these press releases out as if they came from the Whitney, although they were coming from us, and so we would design the layout of the press releases in a certain way or consider how they were distributed. For example, one of those press releases was a piece of music performed on a Saturday afternoon at the Whitney biennial, but we called it a press release. This seems like a straightforward art project, in a way, or maybe not so straightforward. I think the distinction I would highlight is that the work itself attempts to be useful, which is usually anathema to artwork, where its uselessness is what often gives it agency. It becomes something you can think about the world through because it doesn't have to do any work in the world.

I think I'm always interested in troubling that distinction, and so I think graphic design and art are certainly separate, but I think you can approach graphic design as ambitiously as you can approach art.

Liam: I think as we talk about these distinctions and also about Dexter Sinister itself, particularly with Dexter Sinister, it seems like this is an identity that is shared, not just between people, but between physical location and programs that happen at that physical location. And it seems like there's a certain filling up of this identity that maybe explodes what's contained inside of identity itself, and I'm curious how this approach to identity impacts the work or how you think about the work or how other people think about the work?

David: That's a perceptive question–

Liam: (laughs)

David: Perceptive insight. People are always confused. What is Dexter Sinister? We never set out to make it confusing, to make it obscure. In fact, just the opposite, really. But I do think, uh, the way we've treated the name and the way we've treated the work, it jumped from one place to the other. So it's funny you had mentioned identity, as I think that's something that, coming from graphic design, we're particularly attuned to. When we set up Dexter Sinister, we also designed a badge, like a coat of arms, which became our symbol, and I feel like that worked like a typical piece of graphic design. Like the relative success of that mark also amplified what we were doing.

Turns out that the name Dexter Sinister even comes from the design of that mark. In the design of coats of arms, there is a written form, a visual mark, which comes before the mark itself and acts like a set of instructions for how to draw the mark. Our badge is defined by what's called a blazon, a, a, a literal version of it, which is "party per bend sinister," which just means take the form, divide it from the top right to bottom left with a diagonal line. So sinister means left, dexter means right. Hence, the name, Dexter Sinister.

As Dexter Sinister, one project that we made addressed identity very directly. It was an exhibition at Artists Space in New York. I don't remember the year. The name of the exhibition was Identity in quotes, so "Identity." It was a three-screen video about 25 minutes long, which provided a three case studies of art institutions and their relationships to their graphic identity. On the left screen was the Pompidou in Paris, on the middle screen was the MoMa, and on the right was the Tate.

And the work provided a reverse chronology of how they got to their current logo, essentially, and had lots of digressions about the kind of limits of branding in relation to art institutions. This project, I think, addresses some of the same things you're getting at when you, when you say that the name Dexter Sinister bleeds from one kind of identifying capacity to another, so, I, I guess I think that even graphic identity is quite a bit more fluid than the profession wants to identify it as.

Liam: I also want to touch on ORG, which is an organization that you've described as a one-person concern masked as a large organization. It seems to me, especially given the conversation that we've just had and how you mention that graphic design can be ambitious in the same capacity or the same direction as art can, that perhaps positioning an organization this way is itself a kind of commentary.

David: It absolutely is. I incorporated ORG on the first business day of 2000, by design, or by...That happened to be approximately when I needed to do it. The project was self-conscious in its set-up. So ORG, I took the name, as it sounded like the three letter acronym seemed to be a good way to indicate size. I wasn't actually interested in masquerading as a large organization, but I was certainly interested in inhabiting that form, and so I took an office that was on 39th Street in Midtown. I thought that was a good corporate address. When I called the telephone company to get a telephone number for the studio, I asked them to give me as many zeroes as they could give me. And they did. They gave me two. Fairly generous. And a 212 number, so that was good.

I incorporated on the first business day of the new millennium, which was January 3, 2000. I saved or kind of highlighted the papers, which I needed to file in order to become an S corporation in the State of New York. And I wrote a bit of narrative and did some staging of the office in order that it looked kind of bigger than it was. I even ended up writing a piece in The New York Times Magazine about that time that was called "How to Make a One-Person Firm Appear as a Large Organization." I must have written a better title than that, but anyway, it was not the goal just to get press. The goal was to actually do this project where someone might have to hiccup or stop and think for a second about who and how they were hiring this designer.

I guess I'm always interested in questioning or considering the kind of design-client relationship, not as a power grab or anything else, but just as a kind of human reconsideration of it on each project because it's so different, and I think it's very easy to fall into lazy patterns of interaction, which short-circuit what's possible to be made.

Liam: I think it's interesting that ORG is described as another fluid identity of collaborators coming in and out. At times, it's been just you. At times, it's been multiple people. And so it strikes me that that approach can ensure the kind of collaboration that you have said is fundamental to design work, but then there's also the kind of interaction with, like you said, the people who are hiring this organization. And I'm interested in how this approach has impacted those people who hired ORG, and if that thought was sparked as maybe you had hoped.

David: I think sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't, which also I suppose is not surprising. There are clients I've worked with since then, so that's an awful long time, and so obviously they bought the structure and were influenced by it. I think in almost all the situations where I worked on projects, it was very rarely the case that the clients treated the relationship as a straightforward design-client relationship. I was very fortunate in that way.

When it devolved into a more transactional exchange, then I feel like the work got weaker. I got more frustrated. Likely the people hiring me, as well, got more frustrated. The ORG started out as just me, and then became a kind of, as you were describing, a fluid network of people who were both employed by me or simply a writer who I might be working with would stay in the studio for, you know, two weeks, or might be the case. Or sometimes, simply friends or other designers would use the studio from time to time as a kind of base to do work and have some conversation and these kinds of things.

Liam: I also want to hear about the Demise Party.

David: So I'd run ORG for six years by that point. I was getting increasingly frustrated by, not by the scale, but rather by the kind of waste that was inherent in doing projects which needed a larger scale. And so I wanted to reconsider how I was working. I was feeling frustrated by working quite so hard and having so much of it fall by the wayside, and this didn't feel very effective for the people I was working with. Didn't feel very good for me. So I decided to shut down the studio and recalibrate how I work, and work without any assistance, and to work only with Stuart, in that case, to reconsider the conditions of working, as well.

So Stuart and I had found a small basement space on Ludlow Street on Lower East Side, where the rent was really cheap. Also, by reorganizing the studio, I no longer needed all of the equipment I had in the studio, so I had computers, and I had lots of books and reference materials and tables and lights and even a fax machine, at that point. So the Demise Party I held is a public event where I gave away everything in the studio, so those who participated in kind of building up all the material, they came to this party and just took what they wanted, so computers and lights and tables and printed matter and books, and I found it to be liberating. You can imagine. It sounds like it when you clear out a place.

But also really made me feel very good, as those people I'd formed friendships with probably all of whom I still see now, many have gone on to form other studios, do other things. Anyway, the party, we gave away everything. It all happened in one night. By the end of the night, the studio was trashed, and a lot of the stuff was gone. Not all of it by any stretch. People came back and took tables and other furniture later, but that was the Demise Party.

Liam: It seems like quite a radical approach to closing a place down, to give everything away.

David: It was. I think it's typically theatrical in the way that I've organized my design practice, like-

Liam: Hmm.

David: You know, it was both a practical way to give away everything and a way to flag that up as an event.

Liam: I also want to talk about your new book, A New Program for Graphic Design. The book is based on three courses that you had developed for teaching at Princeton, and I'm really interested in what it's like to translate the foundational material of this book into a book format.

David: We did it in a strange way. Again, using some aspect of theater or performance. I started teaching at Princeton 10 years ago, and I was brought in to invent a graphic design course that had never been taught at Princeton previously. The first course I developed was called Typography, and then that developed into a second course called Gestalt, and a third course called Interface. There are now a couple other courses, as well. There have been several other people teaching with me along the way, including Danielle Aubert and Francesca Grassi, and now, Laura Coombs and Alice Chung. So it's just to say, it was not done by myself in isolation, to be clear about that.

The book began as an invitation by Inventory Press, based in Los Angeles, about three years ago. Actually, the Inventory Press is a partnership of Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey. Adam used to be part of ORG, so that's how I met him. He knew about the teaching I was doing at Princeton, as I was developing these, these courses, and he thought it might have a broader appeal outside of the classroom. So he invited me to make a book. I had very little desire to write that book, because somehow that felt like it would make the material too static for me, and it was still working material. So we came up with a different way to make the book, which was instead of writing it, to speak it.

We set up a series of three days in Los Angeles, where Inventory Press is based, two summers ago. Over the course of those three days, each day I gave six 45-minutes lectures with 15-minute breaks in between. These were attended by art students from Otis, from CalArts, from ArtCenter, about 60 people a day or something like that, who were patient enough to sit through all of these lectures. All of these, the proceedings were video taped, video recorded, and after the fact, transcribed, and that became the basis of the book. The event itself was carnival-esque. Between the lectures, uh, there was synthesizer music and light shows and some other things. I think that kind of activity helped give the material a bit more levity than it would have otherwise.

It was also an absurd endurance performance. By the third day, after speaking for two days straight, my voice was shot. And I imagine the audience, at least the persistent audience, was flagging by that point. Anyway, that material was transcribed and edited by Eugenia Bell, and that forms the basis of the book. I think what I am very happy with in the book is that the relative casualness of the address, of the text, of the language, makes it feel a bit more like being in a classroom. And I write in the introduction, and this means I said it when I was out there, I said something to the effect that, "This book is not intended to be a kind of graphic design historical canon. These are simply references of models of people that I know and like and share with students, and anybody else would do it totally differently."

And so I suggest to the reader and to the people who were there, I said, "This is a prompt for you to do the same thing. When you finish reading this book, rip it up and make your own." And I think that license is something I'm always trying to get across in teaching. Like, as a student, you can absorb what you hear in the classroom, but it will only be valuable when you redo it for yourself.

Liam: I think it's really interesting that you delivered the book in that format. But a book is definitely still quite a solid artifact and can't necessarily reproduce the interaction that you might get between a teacher and students or between students themselves. So I'm interested in how that played into how you approached it or how you view it now?

David: You certainly miss the back and forth. That's clear. In teaching, that's a rhetorical strategy I use without like naming it as such, but I don't want to hear my voice drone on for very long. Not because of what it's saying, but more so, I'm worried that the form of one person speaking and nobody else speaking immediately communicates a kind of imbalance that's completely ineffective in a classroom.

In the book, I try to broker the limitations of it being a monologue by making it clear when I don't know something, by offering the material in a manner that perhaps seems tentative or provisional. And that at least I hope allows some room for the reader, not to necessarily disagree, although that's fine, too. Of course they will. But to imagine that they are part of the conversation.

So the book was published by Inventory Press, together with DAP, Distributed Art Publishers in New York. It came out in September of this year and had a substantial print run. We, it's been successful enough that they are reprinting it now. So I'm just going through the page proofs of the second edition, and what I'm finding in reading my own words is a slight bit of discomfort with the casualness of the language. But I think that won't change, and I'm pretty sure it is that looseness which gives it some spark. It looks like a book. I mean, it is a book. Even looks like a straightforward kind of graphic design textbook. But I think there's a bait-and-switch going on.

I think when you pick it up, you realize, oh, this isn't gonna offer me any rules at all. This is simply kind of a recording of one particular point of view, and maybe provides a model for how to do this, or one approach, and that's it. I'm consistently drawn to making work that does that bait-and-switch, and it's not a matter of trying to be elusive or anything else. But I feel like the exterior form can set the conditions for reception, which then the details can undermine and along the way leaves a kind of complicated understanding of the object, of the thing, of the project.

So I, I am thrilled when I see artistic interventions in things that are in the public, and I don't mean public art, but what I mean are like choices which don't seem to be immediately coherent with the situation that they find themselves in.

Liam: And to close the loop from earlier, perhaps the way in which the book is delivered and the casualness of the words actually crystallizes your own identity in the work.

David: Yes.

Liam: There's certainly a much bigger, broader question underneath this, but I think as long as we're talking about one specific work, maybe that'll be helpful. I'm interested in, when you were approached about doing the book, how did you know that it was time for a book or that you should do this or what was your thought process that was like, "Yes"?

David: I think it was the same as all of the work that I make. It's always by invitation. That sounds lazy or unconsidered, but I've realized that's my orientation, and it's not passivity. But it's certainly a, I'm not motivated to make work on my own. I'm motivated by an invitation. I think that's my orientation as a designer, or my, like, identity in that way, is I'm much more interested to be given a situation to work into rather than inventing everything from scratch.

So I was invited to make a book around the teaching. I didn't even consider that it would be 10 years when it came out. I always treat teaching as absolutely continuous with my other work. I never think of it as something that I have to do or I don't, never think of it as something that is external to any of the concerns I have in doing any of my other design work.

So when the invitation came to make a book, I said sure. But let's figure out a way to make a book in a different way that is productive, that makes something new, that doesn't simply wrap up what I'm doing here and seal it away and put it to bed, unless I'm going to stop teaching, which was not my plan. So I can understand what the larger question is, and I think it's essential to my orientation as a designer. Like it's just invitations are what initiate projects, and I never buy the distinction between commissioned client projects and self-initiated projects for myself. This distinction is nonsense. I never, I never initiate projects. They're always by invitation, one way or the other. They may be better or less well-funded, but they're always sparked by somebody else inviting me.

Liam: All right, well, thank you again for joining me today.

David: Thank you very much.

Rob Giampietro, Design Director — MoMA

MoMA’s Rob Giampietro on how design shapes our understanding of the world around us

In this episode, Liam speaks with Rob Giampietro, Design Director at the Museum of Modern Art. Giampietro shares his journey from studio designer to design manager, explores the unseen details of a museum experience, and describes the responsibility designers have to create impact.

---

Liam Spradlin: Rob, welcome to Design Notes.

Rob Giampietro: Thank you so much.

Liam: I wanna start off by hearing about your journey, both to design, and to design directorship.

Rob: I started, um … I was a … a designer, and running my own business very young, I think, relatively speaking. So I started a … a design studio at 23, with a partner, called Giampietro and Smith. And very quickly we kind of have had two main focuses to our business. One was design for culture, and for arts, so we had a lot of art galleries, like Gagosian, and White Cube, and Luhring Augustine, and things that we did a lotta work for. And that was a passion.

And then we fell into a lot of work in doing global nonprofit work. So we worked for, like, the World Health Organization doing annual reports, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria was another one of our big clients. So our, kind of, money jobs were actually feeling really good in terms of, like, our own values and things like that.

At a certain point, we went separate ways, but I was still really passionate about working in design and culture, and partnered with a studio called Project Projects that was run by some friends of mine, who were doing similar work. Brought some of my clients over there. Joined them as a partner for five years. We started at around four, and we grew to about 18.

Did museum rebrandings. I made about, hm, 20 websites during that time, for clients in architecture, fashion, different things like that.

So I think that was actually the beginning of my time scaling myself from being kind of an individual designer, or a design lead, to being more of a manager of a team. And also manager of an interdisciplinary team. Like, not just designers, but, you know, project managers, developers, different things like that.

About right around 2014, I was kind of encouraged to apply for a fellowship called the Rome Prize, which lets a designer spend a few months in Rome doing independent research.

And I was at a point in my career where I was trying to figure out what was next, whether my future was to continue to grow Project Projects, or whether it was something else. And a lot of our technology projects there were getting a little bit repetitive, like a lot of architecture portfolios and things like that. They were wonderful, they were for important architects. I was proud of bringing their histories, and the work of their practice, online. But I was also a little bit like: “What is it like to make real tech?” You know?

And so, when I was in Rome, my project was around mobility, and using mobile devices in an ancient city. And it was during that time, that … I think just sometimes your headspace moves you in a certain direction, but it was during that time that Google reached out with an opportunity to kinda help lead the New York site for Material Design, and grow the design advocacy program that became Google Design and SPAN.

And I think that was actually a conscious moment of transition where, when I was interviewing for the role, I remember there was … Jonathan Lee at Google said to me, “You know, this is not a designer role, it’s a design manager role. They’re different.” It was the first time I’d ever really consciously thought of the difference, and, I think, tried to learn a lot about how Google thinks about that difference, and conceives that difference, and, you know, try to be the best design manager I could be.

Liam: What was that transition like, in terms of the work you were doing, and how you were feeling about it?

Rob: I was never the fastest designer, so I was always a very detailed designer. Really sweated things like baseline grids and kerning, and things like that. But I also was never quite the fastest designer. Like, sometimes it would take me a little longer to come up with a … an idea, or an approach. And, yet, I was always really good at communicating design, at evangelizing design, at being an ambassador for an ambitious idea, to help it reach a public, and make it through all those levels of review and things that design has to go through.

So I think I had started to get a sense, as I was running my business, that my role was shifting from just actually making the work, which is what I was hiring people to do with me, and actually advocating for the work, or showing work and talking about how it could be indicative of how we could solve another new problem for a client. So growing business, and things like that.

So I think I could sense my role starting to shift there, but then I think any designer that’s in that transition goes through an identity crisis, or an impostor crisis, where you sort of say: “Well, if I’m not making design every day, all day, am I still a designer? You know, what does this mean?” And I think that, actually, was, for me, like a multi-year transition. It was not, like, an overnight thing where I just woke up one morning and said,

“Okay, I’m okay with not designing any more.”

Liam: (laughs)

Rob: You know? (laughs)

But I feel like the vision that I help bring to my team, and the way that I help digest problems and frame opportunities for them, or encourage them to bring me solutions, and have me help them move forward in the organization. Like those kinda things. It’s a different kind of design process. It’s a little bit more of an editing process, of a selection process, of knowing organizationally, like, where the most important bets are that you can place with your team’s time, or those kinda things.

I like to quote Rem Koolhaas, he talks about himself being an editor in the studio at OMA. Like, he’s not making the models, but he’s refining the selection process, and helping frame the goals of the project, and continually reinforcing those goals to his team, and you know …

That makes him more an editor or curator than a kind of pure designer, but he’s a very important element of the design process, especially in terms of bringing that process to excellence. So.

Liam: So maybe that’s a characteristic that all designers should strive for.

Rob: Excellence?

Liam: Well-

Rob: (laughs)

Liam: (laughs) Well, I think remaining critical, and thinking as an editor, even as you’re making things.

Rob: I was actually just reading John Maeda’s Design in Tech Report, and he was talking about designers that are a very special kind of introvert. Like, designers are introverted. We’re not the life of the party often. But we’re, like, social introverts. So it’s like we want to be quiet together. And I do think that there … A lot of times, when you’re working visually, the, the transition to words, or to describing what you’re doing, isn’t necessarily easy or seamless.

And so when you have someone there, like, whether it’s another designer or a manager or someone like that, to help discuss an idea, and, uh, help you … give you words to describe what you’re doing that is making visual sense, but maybe not verbal or strategic sense yet, I think that can be very powerful.

And so a lot of my job is to really just be available in the studio, to be that sounding board for people as they’re making work, to say, “What do you think of this? Like, what is working about this? What is not working about this?”

And for me to have a muscle that’s much more a quick critical reflex, rather than that kind of slow, visual development reflex.

Liam: And just staying on this topic of remaining critical, and kind of having an editorial eye, and, like, identifying these opportunities: you’re a senior critic for the Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA Graphic Design Department, and I’m interested in the ways in which that sort of criticism compares to the kind in the studio. The kind where you are involved in the process of making the work, and the one where you’re not.

Rob: Hm. Yeah. It’s really fun. I would say that, like, when you’re working on a team, everyone has a lot of the context for what a design solution is trying to do. But when you’re in the classroom, students are bringing a lot more of their own context. So there’s no better way to get really good at being a design critic, than to be a design teacher, I think. Because particularly for the work that I do with my MFA students at RISD, I’m a thesis at critic. So each of them is working on their own thesis research, and presenting that to me.

So if I have 14 students a year, I’m switching context 14 times. Each time I do a review. And that actually is really good at building that critical muscle, and it lets me do a lotta different things.

One of the things it lets me do is bring lessons from my practitionership, and the world that I’m practicing in, to the students. So I’m constantly able to apply things that I’m learning at Google, things that I’m learning at MoMA, in new ways in the classroom, that I can’t necessarily apply within the organization I’m working in.

And then, I think, the other thing that it helps me do is, as …. Uh, I’ve been teaching there for 13 years now. I start to spot patterns of: where is the design thinking here sound? Where is it going off-track? This student is making this kind of project, and other parallel projects to that have been successful by doing these critical things. And so I have to be there for them, to be interested in it with them.

And that’s been a learning process for me, very often. Like, exposing me to areas of design that I wasn’t drawn to naturally. So I really get a lot out of teaching, and I think a lot of my role as a manager as a kind of teacher or coach. So it also has helped me not be, I think, a micromanager, or someone who is wishing they were designing but just doesn’t have time. You know, it’s a different level of support, when you’re there for someone else, and for them to be successful, and to grow.

So I think there’s a lot of parallels. There’s also some distinctions.

Liam: But I feel like we would be too easily glossing over something if I didn’t talk about the fact that we actually met at Google. When I started back in 2017, there was some overlap between us, and … and I always wished that I could have you on the show, and it’s so convenient now that … (laughs)

Rob: Oh, I’m so … I’m so honored.

Liam: Now that you’re at MoMA, we have-

Rob: I always wished I could be on the show.

Liam: (laughs)

Rob: (laughs)

Liam: We have, uh …

Rob: Wishes come true.

Liam: Yeah, we have so much more to talk about.

But I wanna get into some of the initiatives that you worked on at Google around Material Design, and the sort of idea of design outreach.

First of all, how do you conceptualize design outreach?

Rob: So, I mean, I think when I arrived at Google, Material Design had launched v1, and I think it was really incredible to me, as an outsider, both as an educator and as a designer making websites and projects … Just in terms of the education that it brought to my students who were maybe just becoming familiar with patterns on the web. Like radio buttons, and drop-down menus, and usability best practices and things like that.

I think the academy actually hasn’t quite caught up to the self-education that’s happening by people all over the place, especially at that moment. So I was really inspired by the educational mission of Material, as well as the kind of incredible way that it let you build on top of it. And I thought that that was something that … Often we were, you know, building our own frameworks at Project Projects, and then to have someone come along and give us those frameworks so we could focus more on the design and the design expression for our clients, was just incredible.

So I was really inspired by that, but I think there was a moment to say: “Okay, we’ve put this amazing thing into the world, and now do we continue to help that community around it?” And I think that that was a moment that I was really interested in when I got to Google.

We approached that in a lot of different ways. You know, one of them was we launched the Google Design website, which had been started before I arrived, but I was part of the team that launched that, and also part of its new design iteration. I think, you know, working closely with Amber Bravo, and a lot of the content team … Just talked about, like, “What is our voice when we talk about projects? How do we help make someone who is maybe working on a team of one or two understand what it’s like to work on a team of 30 or 40, and that there are parallel problems there, but there are also very different types of problems that are maybe interesting for Google to talk about when it talks about its own work.”

And I think we felt, like, always worried about monopolizing the conversation, or having our voice be too dominant. And we feel like design is made of many voices at many different scales and positions within a community. So SPAN, I think, became very important as the kind of corollary to Google Design, where, you know, if Google Design is where Google speaks and talks about what it’s proud of, SPAN is a place for Google to create a platform for other people to speak and talk about what they’re proud of.

And I think one metaphor we used while we were developing SPAN was the idea that it should be as good as a Google search in any market. So it’s like if you go into Tokyo, Google should know, just like it knows the great restaurants and can help you find them … It should know the best designers, and it should help you hear from them.

So this idea of, like, the hyper-local really came from that. And, you know, that involved a lot of boots-on-the-ground research to find those people, and hear their stories, and help them draw those stories out and make connections to those stories.

Liam: So we’ve talked now about remaining critical of design, understanding the context of the design, existing in the context of the design, and also involving the kind of place, either geographically or culturally, of the design. But you’ve also spoken about designing in one’s own time, and that’s a concept that I’m really interested in. Could you explain that a little bit?

Rob: Yeah, definitely.

I mean, this was an idea that I’ve had with me throughout my career for many years. But I think the origin of it was that … Before I taught at RISD, I taught at Parsons, and one of the nice things about teaching at Parsons was that if you taught a class you could take a class for free. And my mom is an educator … And just like we say design is never done, her idea is education is never done, you know? So lifelong learning was something that I was really interested in, and wanted to take a web design class. ’Cause I could see that that was training that was important, and growing, in terms of design impact.

And at the time, a number of designers who were trained, as I was, mostly in print and some kind of identity design, were kind of asking me, like: “Why would you wanna make websites? You know, you don’t really control them. They’re impermanent. They change all the time. You know, why not make a book that’s gonna be on a shelf for 50 years, and be durable, and be very much controlled by the designer from end to end?”

And, you know, that was something I really had to wrestle with, as I began to work more and more on the web, and the way I kind of anchored myself to that was to be a designer is to be of your time, and this is an emerging form of our time that needs designers, and where designers can have a greater impact than in so many other forms.

I mean, the form of the book is incredible, but very slow in terms of its evolution, and that’s what’s wonderful about it, is it’s so deliberate and enduring. But if you are someone like me who’s really interested in dabbling in lots of things, and super curious in lots of areas, websites had a different texture and quality, and rhythm to them. I loved the democracy of them, and that you could send a URL to a friend when a project launched, and they didn’t have to go buy the book, or fly to see the show, or something like that. They could actually directly experience that thing.

And yet their experience of it would be super variable. Like, depending on the device that they had, or the moment that they hit refresh on the URL, or whatever. And I just … I thought that dynamism was so amazing.

And I think that was sort of a part of becoming more comfortable with design leadership, was also learning that I was beginning to make a type of design that I couldn’t make completely by myself. There was gonna be different sets of experts, and different types of people that were all gonna be involved in this project. And my goal, as a designer, was to keep reinforcing what the intent of the design was, and how it was solving the problems, or it could solve the problems better.

So I guess I see that as being what that means to me, and, you know, at Google it took a sort of second turn. Because I had opportunity to work on a team here that was under the research and development part of Google, called Google AI, in my last few months at Google, and, you know, that was another amazing opportunity to be part of the design of our time, you know. And to learn about AI systems, and things that were not fully understood by designers in a lotta ways, and to try to both help designers understand that, as a designer, and also begin to learn how to think about those things, and the ways that they could be more ethical, increase liberty, be more inclusive. And where the levers of that would be within a design process.

Liam: So in contrast to designers getting to know technology, there’s a new show opening at MoMA, New Order, that asks how art pushes the boundaries of technology. In the opposite direction. And that’s something that I’ve been really interested in lately, so I’d like to get your thoughts on that question, and also the relationship between art, design, and technology.

Rob: You know, I think the show, New Order, which is curated by my colleague Michelle Kuo, is, uh, using all works from our permanent collection at MoMA, to look at the present moment. And it’s interesting, because a number of different art museums and different institution have done quote unquote “internet shows,” art in the age of the internet, you know, Painting 2.0. These sorts of things.

I think it’s been really interesting to see those efforts come about. I think, particularly … You know, I was able to attend Painting 2.0 in Munich, and just seeing the way that the art world was drawing metaphors from the technology world to talk about painting as a social network, or these different things, almost is the reverse, in some ways, of thinking about the internet as a highway, or something. Like, where instead of metaphors going from the real world to a virtual world, they’re coming back from a virtual world, back to the real.

And I think one of the things that is really important to understand about the show at MoMA right now, is that it’s very, very interested in the real, in materiality. There are a lot of metaphors, but it’s actually very much about the materials as much as the metaphors. And I think that’s an important next step in the critical understanding of art right now, is that it’s actually made of stuff, it’s made of bits. And when you go to an art museum you experience those bits, as stuff, not just as bits.

And so there’s tubs that are filled with ultrasound jelly. There’s a vending machine that not just has Soylent, but has cocaine and blended up dollar bills, and crazy things, by Joshua Klein. Anika Yee did these incredible tubs of ultrasound jelly with things growing in them. There’s a piece by Ian Cheng that uses AI and a gaming engine to create an ambient virtual world.

So there are all these things that really help us to reimagine, and understand differently, what stuff is in today’s world. What a world is in today’s world. What human agency is in today’s world. What a human can make by themselves, and what they can make with other technology, in today’s world.

And I think artists are often at their best when they’re talking about those types of questions, and helping us understand those types of limits, as well. And not directly critiquing society, maybe, but placing objects in society that help us have a debate with one another.

So I think those are all good reasons to see the show.

Liam: So throughout our discussion, it’s become clear that your career has touched on a lot of design disciplines, from typography, to machine learning, to art criticism, to the kinds of meta-design that you do as a design director.

And we’ve touched on the patterns that start building up as you encounter all of these things, but I’m curious if you’ve found any sort of through-lines that intersect all of these things, or, like, commonalities that bring them all together in any way?

Rob: It’s so interesting to hear that.

I think one of the things that I’ve stayed truest to is that I love making culture, as a designer. So, you know, even if I’m working on a branding project, or an app, or something like that, you’re still making a thing that’s going in the world and is part of culture.

And I think one of the very powerful ideas that drew me to Google was that Google is a kind of a cultural institution as much as it’s a technology company. And it has a responsibility … Its public wants it to make good culture. And I think I felt a real connection to the mission of that drive. And I think it does make very good culture. But I think it was fun to be a part of that.

And I think at MoMA, it’s even more present for me, to have the importance of culture, and the way that culture shapes our understanding of who we are, and what is meaningful in life, and … You know.

I remember hearing a philosopher talk a lot about whether or not you should go to an art museum. (laughs) That is seems like an obvious thing that, like, everyone should go to art museums, but, you know, assuming that you’re in mid-life, and maybe you have a family, and you only have so many weekends left in your life, why should you go to an art museum and not go for a walk outside, or something like that?

And I think it … It actually just helped frame for me the kind of scarce resource that time, leisure time, time with ourselves, really is in our world right now. And as someone who is sort of a cultural producer, I really think a lot about that, in terms of: are we asking people to spend time with culture that’s of value to them, and that is really gonna make their lives richer and more thoughtful and more … Maybe even spiritual, you know? To … To use that word. I think people have very spiritual experiences at an art museum that are different from experiences they can have in other parts of life.

So I think the thing that’s fun about working at MoMA in particular, but also I think I experienced this as Google too, is just: in order to get culture right, you’ve gotta sweat the details. You know, it’s all execution at the end of the day, and whether it’s a corner radius on a button for Google Material, or, uh, making the shadow a little bluer, so that it feels a little brighter on-screen, and more connected to the colors of Google’s brand. Or it is the positioning of a wall label, or even removing the label and silk-screening right it on the wall so that it almost becomes invisible, so that you can focus on the art.

Those sort of subtle decisions, when you make them serially, build up to something that is difficult to say why it’s working, but it’s beautiful, and it’s incredible, and it’s not something that someone has the time to conceive of themselves, which is why they’re paying the ticket price for a museum, or the price for an app, or whatever it might be.

So to answer your question in, in a very looped way, I would say: I’ve always been drawn to making culture as a designer, and the thing that’s connected that for me is how detailed it is to make culture, and how sophisticated it is to get culture right.

Liam: Right, and I think someone would argue that, given that most of the physical environment around us every day is designed on some level, anyone who touches that is creating culture, in the same way, since-

Rob: Absolutely, yeah.

Liam: Perhaps about the intent that you mentioned, and really being observant of that, and respectful of it.

Rob: I think often designers are overwhelmed by what they have to produce, but it’s such a privilege to get to make the world. Like, the interface for the world. Whether you’re working virtually, or with materials in the real world. You’re deciding when someone should turn the page. You’re deciding how heavy their phone is that they left up every day. You’re telling them whether they need to swipe to get more information, or they can have it right on the screen.

All of those things are ways that you’re actually changing someone’s experience of their life, and the fabric of their life, through design. And I don’t think there could be a more transformative discipline than that.

I think it creates an even greater imperative for designers to be really good listeners, and I think that that’s something that is another learning, maybe, from my life, is just like: as you go, as a designer, initially you struggle to have your skills, and once you start to master your skills, you wanna show off how great you are at them, and so then you’re very eager to show that you’re capable, and that you have the answers.

And I would say that’s, like … For me, that was, like, a six-year arc, to getting to a place where I no longer felt like I needed to show off what I knew. I could actually have confidence in that of myself, and be patient enough to listen to the problem, and really understand it, before I applied those skills, or made suggestions to people.

And I think the better I’ve gotten at listening, the easier leadership has become, too. Because often you think, like, a leader is there to have ideas, and … and make declarations about what should be done in a certain situation, but really, I … uh, most of the problems that arrive to me, like, no one really has the answer. And it’s sort of just about listening to what everyone thinks the answer could be, and trying to help guide the team through the confusion and the ambiguity of that, to get to something that everyone is excited about executing.

If I just said what I thought without having a lot of context, I think I would make a lot of very bad decisions. (laughs) You know?

Liam: Yeah, maybe after the point when you think you have all the answers, it turns out that the answers are just questions.

Rob: (laughs) Exactly.

Liam: (laughs)

Rob: Yes.

Liam: All right, well, thank you again for joining me today, Rob.

Rob: Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Snelson

Designer Ryan Snelson on inventing your own aesthetic and challenging industry norms

In this episode, Liam speaks with Ryan Snelson, a user experience designer known for his thoughtful product designs and trademark maximalist style. The pair talk about Snelson’s experience redesigning the Myspace UI in 2009, why he champions a gritty and expressive experimental aesthetic, and the importance of understanding the constraints of technology and design.

---

Liam Spradlin: Ryan, welcome.

Ryan Snelson: Hi.

Liam: So, just to get started, like I always do, I want to ask about your journey. So, I’d like to know what you’re doing now, and what it was like to get there?

Ryan: Right now, I’m working for myself pursuing my own projects, contracting here and there. The journey has been kind of weird, I’m still trying to figure it out. I started as a graphic designer. I went to art school. Uh, this is like the late ’90s, when the web was kind of coming about. I had previously, like, played around on GeoCities, making websites. And I thought it was interesting, but it- it didn’t really seem like a field at the time.

Fast forward, in like 1999, I got a job at a start-up in New York, and I didn’t really know what a start-up was, and then it went out of business. And then the next start-up went out of business, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. Because the design stuff was cool, but the technology and the business model really hadn’t worked properly. And- and that just was like a re- recurring theme, early in the late ‘90s.

And then I worked at some digital agencies for a little bit, and doing a lot of marketing stuff, marketing websites, and I realized I didn’t like marketing websites. And I was very interested in what was happening with Web 2.0 and social media, and this idea of like building a web app was interesting.

And then mobile came about, and I did a lot of native mobile. And then, I’m experimenting a little bit with AR, and then I just made a really cool sticker app.

So that’s like the nutshell of things. We can unpack a little bit, all of that.

Liam: You describe yourself as focusing on product strategy and design.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I want to get into the relationship between those two. How do those two blend together, the product strategy versus actually executing something?

Ryan: It’s a great question, I love that question. I’m still trying to figure that out as well. But I would say that where the design and the strategy are separate is that, typically in organizations, whether they’re big or small, the idea of the product is owned a little bit more by product management.

And even though design has a seat at the table and they have a say in vision and aesthetics and potential, when it comes down to like the nitty gritty of what the product is going to be and that definition, I think that’s where the product strategy comes into play.

Where design takes over is in that tangible documentation, whereas product is still kind of doing the same stuff as UX, uh, but they’re diving a little deeper, more into analytics and usage and trends and optimizing in that way, which I think is really, really fascinating.

So I’ve tried to balance that a little bit more with my design practice. I’ve learned a lot through that. I wasn’t always like that. I always thought, like, oh, this is a cool design, so that means everything’s great, and that’s really not the case.

Liam: Yeah, I think of some of my experiences working on smaller design projects and seeing that potential, like you mentioned, and it’s really easy to lead that into suggesting new features, or like one thing builds on top of the other as you dig into the design.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: So product strategy might actually be reigning that in a little bit-

Ryan: It is.

Liam: … and actually putting constraints on that.

Ryan: And- and I think the big constraint is m- matching the blue sky potential, with what is really possible. And seeing how developers work, and working closely with developers, has really opened my eyes to, you know, what is possible versus, oh, check out this really cool design. Oh, it can’t really be built and it’s not really possible, but let’s do it anyway. Like, that’s just setting yourself up for failure.

So the product is like, you know, thinking of the product strategy and- and seeing what’s the potential with developers, what’s the potential with design, and then where’s the vision and the- and the business goals and the user goals, and trying to match that a little bit.

Liam: Right.

Ryan: That’s how I think about it. Whereas, talking about, to answer your question, the breakdown of the execution part, the other side of this is, you know, inheriting a set of requirements and executing in a very siloed manner, even though you’re collaborating and solving little interaction problems and user problems, you know, to have more understanding and voice in the product, helps, I think, at the end of the day, make that product a little bit better.

Liam: Absolutely.

Ryan: Yeah. It makes the design better, I think.

Liam: I want to dig in, specifically, to one project you’ve done which is Flashback Sticker Attack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: What was the motivation behind creating a sticker pack?

Ryan: So I originally set out to create an augmented reality prototype, and I sat down and I taught myself how to use Unity. And I was playing around with it and I finally got my web camera to show a floating box, and I was like, this is cool. Like wow, this is really cool. And I realized, yeah, it’s cool, but it’s not doing anything. It’s not really a product. It’s not something I would use every day. It’s just like a gimmicky, wow factor for now, and I wasn’t happy with that as like building something.

And, uh, what I realized is that, I had been doing that a lot in the last couple of years. I’d been playing with prototyping tools, and I’d been getting things that are just close enough, but they needed to be built.

So what I wanted to do is build something that I could handle end to end, from content to deployment to updates to marketing. And then I came up with this sticker pack, because I had tried to teach myself Xcode last summer and I totally bombed at it. I was like, this is … I’m not- I’m not messing with this.

But then when I was looking at the different options within Xcode, the sticker pack was something that I could do. And they say, well, there’s no coding with sticker packs, and that’s technically correct. Like, you’re not sitting there writing lines of code, but there’s this weird protocol with getting your, you know, developer license and getting your keys right and sending your builds out through TestFlight, and just going through everything that you would normally do with like a native app, besides having to write millions of lines of code.

I’m having a lot of fun with it. It’s the most fun thing I’ve done in a really long time, and I think mostly because I just get to do whatever I want to do and see what happens with it. And so far, it’s been, you know, it’s been good.

Liam: I’m especially interested in, like, the potential of sticker packs, because I see them coming to like more and more apps.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And even things like Google’s keyboard enables stickers now. So I’m interested, like, what do you think are the broad possibilities of communicating that way?

Ryan: Well, you know, using emojis have been a lot of fun, but emojis are getting really boring. And people are using emojis in really fun creative ways, um, but every time like Apple or Google come up with the next set of emojis, they’re kind of limited, and they’re very, very static.

And when I started looking at stickers, I found that all of the stickers were just really, really cute and quote unquote “delightful”, and there were so boring. And I was like, you know what? Why aren’t they animating? Why aren’t they- why don’t they look like crazy gifts? Why aren’t they a little bit more random? Why aren’t they a little brighter? Why aren’t they a little bit more lo-fi and flashy? And that’s kind of where I was thinking, well maybe I’ll- maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll make a sticker that- that moves a lot. So all of them are animating.

My requirements for building one is that they have to be blinking, they have to be animating, they have to be moving, even if they’re a very limited amount of frames, because I think that they’re fun when you layer them on top of each other.

So in iOS, you can pull them from the tray and then you can add another one on top of each other. So, if you create them with transparencies, that creates a- another effect when you combine a couple of them. So that’s been fun. I’m trying to make them not boring and cute.

Liam: I want to dig even further into that.

Ryan: Let’s do it.

Liam: Into the aesthetic of the Flashback Sticker Attack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: You’re kind of like cutting together a lot of visual styles, and like animations and stuff, and I also kind of get a similar vibe from the way that you present your work online, and I want to get into where that aesthetic comes from.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we were coming up to this, like how to start describing what you’ve just asked. And in retrospect, I attribute it to learning Flash, the application Flash back in the late ‘90s.

So if you remember, if you’ve worked on the web back then, you had html and then you had Flash. And html was just the static tables, you know, very, very boring aesthetics. And then you had Flash, which was just like … I don’t even know how to describe it anymore, but it was animation. It was intros, outros, it was sounds, it was everything that motion is, and everything that native animation kind of is today, but it was unregulated. Like people were just experimenting.

And what’s happened, I think, stylistically to answer your question, is that there has been a wash of style over the web and over apps. Everything’s quote unquote “clean”. Everything’s delightful, everything’s safe, and everything’s not rocking the boat a little bit. Not to say that style rocks the boat, but like when you’re a little bit sloppy and a little grittier with it, I think there’s a little bit more of an emotion that comes through. Now that’s, you know, specifically related to the content of the stickers, right? Obviously, if I was building a system, I’d want it to be very, very usable.

But when the opportunity arises to like make something fun or to make something boring or clean or not boring, it’s like, you- you have that option as a designer. And I forget where I heard it but, one of the biggest things a designer has is their ability to be creative. And I think that product design and user experience design has, in a sense, like, muddled that a little bit because it’s all about following the standard, right? And it’s not about, you know, rocking what the user’s going to come into a little bit.

And this is where the experimentation comes into play, and that’s really all this is. It’s experimenting, you know, if there’s a ton of designs that look one way, I want to try to go the other way. And I think that that’s always a good way to reinvent aesthetics, because aesthetics are like trends that are here and then they’re gone. Which is I think why, you know, a lot of companies are saying like, let’s just be really, really clean and un-style, you know?

It’s no frills, like the design of today’s native apps are just no frills. It’s like walking down a cereal aisle and being like, those are just the Chex. There’s no brand, there’s no nothing, you know?

Liam: Yeah. Although, I could also see extending that grocery analogy. Like, we could get to a point where the aesthetic is so overloaded that nothing stands out in the opposite direction.

Ryan: Well, that the problem, right? And I think at one point that was good, because the web early on, it wasn’t regulated in usability, it was just like a free fall. People are just putting buttons all over the place. You know, you couldn’t read tech sizes, there was loading, splash screens, and I mean it was just wild, uh, and it was interesting.

Ryan: Whereas now, it’s not interesting enough, I think. And it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, it’s just not as interesting.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: So, I’m trying to stylistically be interesting, and hopefully- hopefully (laughs) it’s interesting. Maybe people don’t think so, but I don’t know.

Liam: Yeah, I think speaking of the early web, it reminds me of where I learned html, which is Myspace.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I saw on your website, that you actually worked on kind of a redesign of Myspace-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … a while ago, so I’m interested to talk about that. What was the background for that project, first of all?

Ryan: This was going back, I think, like 2009-ish. I was on the UX team there, and the mandate was to stop the bleeding of users leaving Myspace and going to Facebook. What was interesting about it is that we were the underdog. No one really cared about it, I think, from the generation that had migrated over to (laughs) Facebook.

So it wasn’t about like getting them to come back, as much as it was to stop the bleeding of users, clean up the site in the sense that we could make it more usable. Some of the restraints were, editing tools were difficult from a back end to redesign. The music player, we couldn’t really get into that a lot early on. Like, I don’t know if you remember, but it was all in Flash, and we couldn’t really edit a lot of that.

So there were political reasons for design changes, and then there were things that we could control, like changing the navigation, grouping things a little bit better. We did a lot of AB tests on streams and profiles, and then we released very small changes over time, until the big redesign, and then it got redesigned again.

But the press wasn’t very nice to Myspace. I remember reading articles, like who cares? All the big blogs would be like, what are they wasting time for? And it was fun because being in that space, you could just experiment a little bit and try things a little bit more, and I learned a lot there. I ended up running the mobile team and I learned a lot from people that were on that mobile team, and this was iOS 3, iOS 4.

And there wasn’t really a place to go to get all these design patterns. So you couldn’t go read the HIG, like you could today. So it was learning through the engineers, and they would say like, no, this is what we can do with the navigation. This is how we would use the back buttons.

And so a lot of that stuff was kind of coming through where the developers were building this stuff. And then I would be able to say, well, could we try this, could we try that? And then some of it worked, some of it didn’t work. But I was really proud of the work we did there, despite, you know, the fact that people wrote it off and they were like, we’re going to Facebook, Facebook’s better.

But, you know, Myspace was the biggest social network at one time, and then it wasn’t. And you see that pattern happens a lot, right? Look at what happened to G+. It was there, and then it was gone, and it was supposed to be something. And socials weird, right? Like people didn’t leave Facebook to go to G+. The behavior of crowds in social, it’s just like why would I want to move all my stuff again?

So, I think that’s what we’re seeing with social. Like, with Instagram and Snapchat, it’s like, they- they do it a little bit differently. They’re like sliced off from the bigger networks.

Liam: Yeah. I think that migration aspect is really interesting, especially thinking specifically about Myspace and Facebook.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Because I remember probably in the early years of high school is when I was on Myspace, and that was the social network.

Ryan: Were you catfished? (laughs)

Liam: (laughs) Luckily, no, I was not. But it had like all of these things that Myspace established.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Like, customizing your profile template. Like, that became an entire industry unto itself.

Ryan: It- it did.

Liam: Selecting songs to play automatically on your profile, which now we like shudder at the thought, but.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: It’s interesting to me that it kind of set up all of these things that users were used to and love doing, and yet they still went to a network that did not have those things.

Ryan: And I think that the CEO of Myspace at the time, Mike Jones, wrote a lot about, like, wh- what does he think happened? And one of the focuses was on utility. Like Facebook had a really good utility. Things would work when you submitted the button, right? You didn’t have to wait a lot of time to upload something. The usability was just really right on. So I think users were willing to sacrifice that customization at that time.

But, you know, when you think about today, the idea of customizing a profile, you can’t do that. If you remember when you were in high school, if you were customizing Myspace profiles, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. You could get into the code and make your own page with Glitter Graphics and- and whatever you wanted, you know, but you can’t really do that, and there is restraints on systems today. They don’t want you to do that for whatever reason. And I think that there’s just something to be said for, you know, that level of expression.

So that’s the types of restraint I think that the web and native mobile has, is that the expression comes through in the form of content, not really so much the system anymore.

Liam: So do you think that social media has uncovered a way that we wish to express ourselves, that wasn’t present in previous iterations, or do you think that it’s actually influenced that?

Ryan: I think a little bit of both. Like, the first thing that comes to mind is the camera access, right? Like having access to the camera and taking photos, is probably the fastest, quickest way to express, or to show what you’re all about.

So it’s less about, oh, I want to change the color of my profile, than it is saying, hey, check it out. I’m at this podcast with Liam, and l- look at this crazy set. And to have the tools to be able to do that really, really fast, and then to share them out quickly with whoever you intend to see, I think is really, really important. So there’s that utility of it.

But I don’t know, it’s tough to say where the pendulum will swing back. I think that removing the barriers of the UI within social, is always going to happen. But, you know, you see this now with kids, they’re using Snapchat, and then they’re using Instagram Stories, and then they’re not using Snapchat as much, and it’s just like, well that’s what happened with Myspace.

And as cluttered as Myspace was at the time, you know, Facebook is going through those clutter problems. And, you know, that’s why they- they- they seem to like white label a lot of these other types of apps, to test them and to see if they would work to get those users that don’t want to use the main site. They just want to do like snippets of things like messenger, you know, which is a cool way to break off and segment.

Liam: Yeah. I think I’m seeing like a parallel to our earlier conversation about how aesthetics move from-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … clean to gritty and experimental.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And the same way, we see something like Snapchat, that removes all abstraction between you and self expression, because it’s literally just you expressing directly-

Ryan: Right.

Liam: … versus something that’s more produced-

Ryan: Right.

Liam: … like an Instagram or something like that.

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, since Instagram released the Stories, there’s that conflict I have, which is, do I post a story or do I post and curate the perfect photo? And what I found is that, by posting the photo, you get to look back on it in time.

At that present time where you’re posting that photo, maybe it’s not like the greatest, right? Or that the story is exactly the same. But like if you go to look back on it in like a year or six months, and that story is gone, but you have that history there, I think that that’s validation for a traditional social newsfeed or stream, versus this ephemeral, like it shows up and then it disappears. I think it’s cool. I really don’t know which one is going to win at the end of the day.

Liam: Do you save your Instagram Stories?

Ryan: Not really, no. (laughs)

Liam: I would be interested to know how many people save the video clips from their stories.

Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I just think there’s something interesting there about the psychology of like, which thing you would rather consume later.

Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting, I think it’s fun. We’re talking about stickers, you see Instagram using stickers, and they’re pumping out all different kinds. They’re … it just seems like every time you open it up, there’s like a new sticker.

But it’s all the same stuff. It’s like dog face filters and fluttery stars. And yeah, it’s cool and it’s gimmicky, but I- I don’t know. You know, like those are the trends that are happening now. With AR it’s like, put your face in front of the camera and we’ll do something to it, and that’s- that’s cool, I guess.

Liam: I want to switch gears from talking about user experience to talking about teaching user experience. Um, you’re teaching a course at General Assembly, and as a designer, um, a lot of my job is also talking about design, whether it’s with stakeholders or other designers or developers or what have you, but that’s different from actually instructing someone on UX.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I’m interested to explore that difference.

Ryan: As a practitioner in the field, you get to a point where you know the basics, and you- you’ve had some wins, you’ve had some losses. Then you look at like curriculums and teaching that stuff, and I think it’s a very humbling thing to be standing there with people that are excited to learn something new, and to try to guide them and try to show them, hey, this is what works, this is what doesn’t work. I think learning anything is always challenging.

So what I’ve learned through the teaching experience is that there’s two types of mindsets. There’s a fixed mindset and there’s a growth mindset. And the fixed mindset says, this is the way it is. There’s no changing it. This is what I believe. And then the growth mindset says, well, even though this is new, I’m going to be open to seeing what could happen with it. And students come in with one of those mindsets, and that’s always, I think, the challenge in teaching design, right?

Because design is- is … There’s so many different niches within design these days, that I often time meet a lot of traditional designers. Like, I started as a traditional graphic designer, right? But they’re still practicing this today, and they’re getting into digital and they’re getting into product, and it’s a little alien. And sometimes they’re like, I don’t believe in design thinking, or, what do you mean, iterations? Like of course, I’m just coming up with stuff.

And- and it’s like, well, what we try to talk and- and expose is that, you’re not the only one coming up with it, that you’re working with product, and you’re working with developers, and you’re working with stakeholders, and you’re trying to find that balance.

So there’s two parts to it. There’s the skill that the designer learns through the methods, and then there’s the soft skills to make the decisions around those methods. That’s how I look at it.

Liam: I’m also interested in those like methods and tactical things.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: I feel like a lot of times when working as a designer, you come up with rationale and reasons for doing things that are based on this institutional knowledge of all of these things you’ve accumulated over the years.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: What is it like to try to translate that?

Ryan: I think that one of the great things about GA is that people come in from different backgrounds to teach that stuff.

So, to give you an example, like maybe like a couple of years ago, people were talking a lot about research, and one of the gripes that I’ve always heard and I’ve experienced this myself, is that there’s not a lot of time to research in the real world, right? People aren’t paying for the quote unquote “research” directly, front and forward, and research becomes like an insurance play, in a sense.

So how do you get around that? And it’s always like, well, you just do it. Because I think a lot of times, new designers will look for permission constantly to figure things out, or they think that there’s a magic button that’ll just tell me what the experience is going to be, right? And it’s like, no, you got to go and you got to talk to people and you got to try things.

But I think the biggest thing is like getting new UX and product designers to have a point of view about something. Whether it’s just the fact that they like it for some reason, is not good enough. They have to like unpack it a little bit, and show that this is working because it makes this flow easier, or this is a design pattern that is emerging or- or has been killed, and we should or shouldn’t use it. You know, so it’s defending through that type of validation versus just like, oh I’ve seen this before in the past, and so this is what you have to do.

You know, a more specific example is when we go over mobile and we talk about the human interface guidelines and material design and, you know, I’m always like, here are the components. You want to use a keyboard on iOS, it’s the light one or the dark one, you know. And trying to get people to understand that those patterns and those UI elements have been thoughtfully designed and put into that system, and if you learn how to use them, it’s like going into like Home Depot and picking a bunch of door knobs or, you know. Those are the materials, right?

Are you going to use like the right door for the house, or are you going to use like a garage door opener to open your bedroom door? It’s like, it’s about what’s the most appropriate element.

Liam: I’m interested in that point about developing a point of view in design-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … and working through validation. Do the methods of validating and thinking about design decisions that way, become the point of view itself?

Ryan: I think it could be a little bit of both. I like to work with designers that have point of views, even if I think that they’re wrong. I’m just like, they believe in this thing and then let’s find out why or why not. I think that the problem with new designers is that they’re too timid. They’re too afraid to speak up about what is good or what feels right or, you know, what has worked in the past. And I don’t know why that is, and I think that maybe there’s this timidness in teams, where they don’t want to say the wrong thing or the teams are too big, or.

I mean, I’ve certainly been in positions where I thought something was the way it should be and it wasn’t, and I- I was like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t want to get in trouble, you know. (laughs)

So having like that point of view and that vision for how something could be, even if it’s in the slightest, I think people identify that, and you can always vet it, right? You can try it, and that’s the best thing about product.

Liam: But also kind of balancing your point of view with like not falling into a fixed mindset, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Like establishing like a set of beliefs about design that don’t keep you from evolving those beliefs?

Ryan: I guess to rephrase it, I would rather have a designer start and be on the wrong path, than to wait around and be like, I need more information. I don’t know what to do.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: But I don’t have this, you know. It’s like, no, just start with every information you have, that’s like the point of view. Like, you know, people talk about like self-starting. Like that’s it, right? It’s like, out of all the things that I know and of all the information that I have, I’m going to take this and try to do something with it, not just sit around, and be like, I don’t know what to do.

Liam: I can relate to that feeling. And I think something that helps is just keeping in mind, ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: If you’re trying to make a decision about something.

Ryan: Yeah, and I think trusting your team, right? I’ve been lucky to have good mentors in my design career, where I could watch them and try to emulate them, or if I didn’t know something, feel like it’s okay that I don’t know it and I’ll get to that answer.

I don’t know if it’s just like the state of design teams these days, but they think they’re expected to know everything and, you know, even when I go through the workshops and the design challenges at GA, it’s like sometimes I don’t use all the methods professionally.

Like, I wasn’t using user journeys for years. I was going through them and talking about them, and I would say, you know, full disclosure, I don’t make these, but some people do. You know, I make storyboards and here’s a storyboard.

So there’s not one method that’s better, that’ll get you what you need to do. It’s just like, you’re just communicating what you intend to happen, but you can’t rely on the process alone, you have to have the output of something. There’s a lot of like design people that are just process junkies. It’s like, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re going to brainstorm this way, and we’re going to use these sticky notes, and we’re going to come to this like massive consensus.

And you spend all day in this process, and it’s like, well, if it doesn’t work for you, you know, you don’t have to do that.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: It’s the … The whole point is the output. The process and the methods are just there to get you on the rails, so that you can get to that output, to that deliverable, to that prototype, to that test, whatever.

Liam: Right. So putting a hammer and a screwdriver and a saw, like in the same room, doesn’t build you a house, I guess. (laughs)

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly right.

Liam: So to wrap up, I want to talk about how you see your creative process changing, how it’s changed over time, and I’ll say where it’s going in the future.

Ryan: I don’t even know how to answer that. I think that I’m trying to be a little bit more risky with the type of work that I try to take on. I’m not saying yes to a lot of projects, I’m starting to say no more because I’m getting to the point where, how much time is it worth investing in these projects? And I don’t know, right? But I’m learning.

Ryan: I want to be working with teams that have that point of view, that I can have those conversations with and just figure out like, do we have a … like an alignment on things? Could we come together, create an album and sell a bunch of records, and then be done with it? Or is this going to be just this uphill, figuring it out constantly?

So I think for me now, the creative process is about alignment with the right teams versus thinking that I alone, and my process, will get me to that next thing.

Liam: Right.

Ryan: I think what I can control is my own personal output, but I can’t control the development on a lot of things, or sometimes the financial situation of some projects or some start-ups.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a good answer. (laughs)

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: All right. Uh, well thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s fun.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: Cool studio.

Sang Mun, YAW Studio

Interdisciplinary designer Sang Mun on how privacy-focused design can empower users

In this episode, Liam speaks with interdisciplinary designer Sang Mun of YAW Studio. In the interview, recorded in Seoul, South Korea, Liam and Sang explore how the ZXX typeface — which was born from Sang’s experience in special intelligence — helps us consider privacy and the nature of the information that shapes our lives, how accessible tools can empower users, and how to think about the practical constraints we all face as designers.

---

Liam Spradlin: Sang welcome.

Sang Mun: Thank you for having me.

Liam: So, just to get started um I always ask about the journey so what do you do now and what has the journey been like to get there?

Sang: So, right now I’m running a design studio called YAW with two other good friends of mine and their furniture space and product designers. So, we work on 360-degree brand designs from spaces to brandings to other collaterals and apart from that we also just started a new brand that’s called band of colors and it’s men’s underwear and swim shorts brand so that’s what I’ve been working on in the recent years and prior to that I was a graphic design fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. After that I came back to Korea and worked as a graphic designer for this two big corporations in Korea so, once called Hanwha and the other ones on Hyundai Motor Company.

Liam: So, how did you get your start?

Sang: Actually, I studied on film and video first back from high school I guess, I guess I went into design because I used to skate online and listening to all this punk rock music, being able to adopt the album covers, two music videos, to other visual noises that I kind of got into. So, I guess uh-hmm I was always interested in the graphics and the visuals that connected with me so it was kind of natural for me to move on from film and video to graphic design.

Liam: I’m really excited to have you on today because you know the philosophy of design notes is really about finding the common threads that run through different types of design work and the ways that we approach them from each discipline and it seems like the breadth of your work is a perfect reflection of that pursuit, you’ve been involved in designing a lot of different types of things so, I’d like to hear about some of the projects from different disciplines that you’ve been involved with and the common patterns that you picked up through those experiences?

Sang: I really try to focus on telling the story and just going into the chorus and stuff what this product has to tell or what this brand has to tell or what does photography for instance, where space has to tell to the story and I just forming a bond of sympathy with the end users it’s what I try to focus on the best and I think that has changed a lot comparing to the works that I’ve done in the past because before I think we all designers have this ego because we just feel like we’re still students at school so, after leaving school I think it was a hard transition in a way but I think it worked well in the end and I’m still trying to work more on that aspect in trying to think as a non designer, like how they would approach this outcome that I mean and how they associate it with their context.I think that’s the common approach that I have in all the projects.

Liam: I’m interested in dissecting how you go about finding the story of a product and how that’s formed?

Sang: So, for instance I guess I guess one of the most successful projects that I’ve done was the ZXX typeface, I think it told a very humane and kind of silly idea and I think it resonated with a lot of people in the way that I was telling a true story of mine in a graphic way and also you know casual but scary way and I try to input my life into those projects in the way that I tell a story for instance, on the ZXX was a story of mine where I was on special intelligence personnel for the Korean military associated with the NSA and I had an opportunity to tell that project in a story that was based with my own experience of how to extract information or special signal information.

Liam: Yeah and I can definitely see through reading about ZXX that there is that like personal story component but you also relate it to the people who are viewing it and saying like this is you know we need to make use of the difference between technological and human perception.

Sang: Right.

Liam: To keep ourselves camouflaged as much as we can.

Sang: Right.

Liam: I do want to dig into that a little more specifically as we move further into an age of machine learning and AI. It seems likely to me that technology might catch up with something like ZXX and learn how to read it. So, I’m interested to know; a, like how your thoughts about that have changed over time since the ZXX first launched?

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Liam: And then I’m also interested in discussing whether that too could be subverted, whether technology could be used to design things that full technology.

Sang: Right. So, there’s been a lot of political changes in the Korean society where our democracy has been really a challenge with the corruptions of all like for instance, the National Intelligence Service getting into political and private life and kind of all turning the mindsets of the citizens. I guess I haven’t really been working more on these kind of projects but I think it’s always stayed in my mind to tackle this project or tackle this events in a different way and after the ZXX.

Sang: I think people are kind of pent up with the status quo and the way that they don’t think they could really do anything to keep their privacy private in a way and I think there has to be more of a like fun approach to be able to make them use these tools because what I’ve seen so far is that ZXX has been used only through the creative fields or the people who find what’s funny about it or what’s really working about it but for the just regular people who are outside of the design field it’s hard for them to relate to it so trying to push and pull between that creativity and finding easier way for them to use the tools might be a good way.

Liam: And is that something that design could accomplish? I think we know about the direct impact that design can have on someone’s experiences or ideas but using design to empower people in a more indirect way.

Sang: For sure because for instance like with the tools that Google’s giving out like all this free apps that you guys have just for instance like, the translators or other free resources that are out there. When is easy for a regular user to be able to approach it and use it in their daily life, I think it is the power design and it’s the power of the technology that could reinforce them to be more private in a way so, I think that’s the tool that design can really change.

Liam: I’d also like to dig into one of the things, when I was reading about ZXX that you said was about articulating our own freedom. I’m interested if this idea has manifested more in your work since then.

Sang: Not to the extent that I really wanted to because I was working on version 2 of ZXX, which was growing more in depth where right now the camouflages and the other 14 leaders were it was a one dimension typeface but I was working on making two and three dimension typeface that could really create an endless permutations but that kind of failed so but but I do keep thinking about this articulating our unfreedom and I think I got inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 and the Newspeak dictionary. How when you start shrinking the diction’s that we can use with then I think it really alters with the mindsets so, I think we are unfree in a way in this society because we’re always in the realm of my overloaded information that are given out from corporations to the governments and I think it really impacts our freedom of thinking.

Liam: I’m interested in the concepts behind ZXX 2.0. You mentioned two-dimensional and three-dimensional…

Sang: Right.

Liam: Typography. What would that look like?

Sang: So, the idea was to when you type in a letter A, the letter A would pop up and then with the algorithm like a random layer would go on top of it and if you want to go more than another layer or go on of it. So, it’s kind of challenging the way that humans could still recognize it as a letter A but as you said the machine would not be able to keep learning what this letter is because you’re giving it different random layers on top of it and I found out that this was possible to do with talking to other engineers but it’s a lot of work (laughing).

Liam: Yeah (laughing) but that does kind of get it the idea of using technology to kind of subvert technology in new ways.

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I’m also interested in again in the idea of the power of human perception versus machine perception and I think that that’s something that’s still continuing to rapidly evolve but have you developed any further this idea in a more broad sense of encoding thoughts and ideas into design that is only perceptible by humans?

Sang: That’d be really interesting. I’m always interested in challenging the visuals that the humans could encode and decode and one of the other projects that I was working on was like decoding a JPEG so working with codes that are encoded in it and then just changing the different layers of the information to make it extract another JPEG, which keeps evolving and just telling you the way that we perceive an image. I didn’t really had the chance to further that study yet but I did think about recently. I saw a vocal app which was presented in the Adobe Conference and it’s really scary because it encodes a human voice and then you could really alter the way that the voice could make any sounds that you want and I think right now we’re moving from an image based or editing an image to moving images to voice now with all the AIs and voice recognition software that are really getting crazy right now. So, my interest has kind of evolved from image torching software’s to voices these days.

Liam: Yeah. I guess that’s a good point because as this technology continues to develop removing not only to a place where it’s important to distinguish between the visual capabilities of humans and machines to perceive things but also whether the things we perceive are actually authentic. So, switching topics a little bit, I’d also like to know about band of colors.

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: How did that come about or what’s the, what’s the story behind that?

Sang: So, band of colors was kind of a random project coming out from three designers whose background is graphic designer, product designer and furniture designer and we were always interested in doing a business together and we just thought about expanding our studio culture and trying to challenge ourself into creating a commodity that hasn’t been challenged or that could be disrupted at this point especially in Korea and we found out that all the designers were only focusing on commodities that could be war or used in these outer layers.

Sang: So, like first dimension visuals but we want to create something that could be fun in a way, that not many designers are tackle so random and that’s how it came about and while researching about the market we found out that it was a huge huge market that hasn’t been challenged for my decades where this old corporation still owned 60% of the market share. So, that’s how it came about and I think also we wanted to create something that could enhance the daily life of every man and not just make a crazy-looking graphic design or design commodity but then something that could kind of be timeless and just could be kept in their wardrobe.

Liam: Something I was going to ask about too is kind of where the patterns and prints come from…

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: For band of colors. So, it sounds like the material creates some of those constraints as to like what can be done in terms of design?

Sang: Right and the design is so I think we have more than like 400 designs and we sketched and yep just just like you mentioned because of the restrictions that we were facing with the manufacturing process, we had to deselect the best designs that we wanted to make and then kind of compromise within the fields.

Liam: Just because this endeavor seems fairly different from most of your other work, I want to know how you would compare this work to kind of your other creative pursuits?

Sang: It’s, I think it’s really crazy that (laughing) I mean seeing the outcomes right now and knowing the journey that we were taking I think the main difference is that as a design studio we always had clients and we always had the design brief that came from outsource but for band of colors we were our own clients so we had to work on the finance, work on the marketing budget, work on all these other parts that were outside of design and also with having three designers from different disciplines we had to really come to a consensus of what this product had to look like and I think that was a real challenge that we were all facing because we just had different mindsets.

Liam: So, just kind of speaking to the difference in both visual style and process in band of colors compared to your earlier work. I’m interested in looking at the complete timeline just to wrap up. How your creative process has changed over time across all of your projects and also where you see it going in the future?

Sang: Mm-hmm. So, before I was working for different clients and when I was a student you had a lot of time to really tackle and research and try to study the contents to the fullest amount that you can but I think the process had to change when I was working for real clients because there was always limited budget to limited time so yet really dissect the amount of research to sketching, to designing and to production. So, I guess they really changed the mindset of how I approached design now and also it changes from designing a logo, to typeface, to space, to photography, to websites. I’m always thinking about the budget and the timeline and the audience that it has to meet. That kind of changed in the way that I design things right now.

Liam: And so how about in the future and you see that kind of evolving past now?

Sang: So, in the future I think I’m still gonna be challenged with the budget issue especially talking about the Korean clients because they always come in with the really limited budget that is always challenging and being able to challenge them back to make them use more passion in creating the best contents for them to be able to be different from the other competitors. It’s always a challenge for our studio and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we always have to face for other you know young designers that are going to emerge into the real design fields because if we don’t challenge the clients of today right now then the younger generations are going to suffer it again. So, I think we keep pushing the clients to meet like 50–50 consensus instead of them really over ruling our creativity.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a good point and I think as designers a lot of times we think about our challenges with clients, being around things like having a consensus on being creative vision but actually something very practical and utilitarian like budget…

Sang: Right.

Liam: Kind of has this ripple effect across all of the functions…

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: That you do as a designer…

Sang: Right.

Liam: So, that’s really interesting point but yeah. Thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Sang: All right. Thanks for having me.